Review: In ‘Ava,’ Elizabeth McGovern casts a spell at Geffen Playhouse as a classic Hollywood femme fatale

Ava Gardner, a classic Hollywood femme fatale who was once voted the world’s most beautiful woman, may have been more famous for her off-screen drama than for her on-screen performances.

Mickey Rooney, with whom she was briefly married, referred to her as “a lady of passion — one of them rage.” (His philandering certainly gave her reason to be furious.)

Her other husbands, jazz musician Artie Shaw and the one and only Frank Sinatra, tried and failed to control her. Not even the über-wealthy Howard Hughes, smitten to the point of violent obsession, could subdue Gardner’s indomitable will to be dependent only on her own mercurial terms.

Gardner’s steamy personal life is recalled in “Ava: The Secret Conversations,” a play adapted by its star, Elizabeth McGovern, from the book “The Secret Conversations” by Peter Evans and Gardner herself. McGovern, best known for portraying Cora Crawley on “Downton Abbey,” delivers a show that trades perhaps more heavily on her own stardom than Gardner’s.

My memory of Gardner dates back only to “Earthquake,” the 1974 disaster movie in which she was playing off her tabloid image. I wasn’t yet born when she was at the height of her fame, and though I’ve seen her performance in the film version of Tennessee Williams’ “The Night of the Iguana,” I can’t say I’ve spent much time delving into a movie career that Gardner herself acknowledged wasn’t built on acting ability.

But Gardner worked with some of the best. (Her one Oscar nomination was for “Mogambo,” the 1953 John Ford film, which also starred Clark Gable and Grace Kelly.) Those with a sharp eye for talent admired her natural instinct. The camera adored her, and she returned the love.

Gossip columnists dined out on her scandals. But “Ava: The Secret Conversations,” which is making its U.S premiere at the Geffen Playhouse, is more fascinated by Gardner’s strength and resilience.

The play, directed by Moritz von Stuelpnagel, takes place in London in 1988, two years before her death. Gardner is impaired from a stroke that paralyzed one side of her face and left one of her arms more or less useless. Hard up for money, she has agreed to write her memoirs instead of selling her jewels.

Peter Evans (Aaron Costa Ganis), a recovering journalist working on a novel, doesn’t believe that the woman calling him out of the blue is really Ava Gardner. His agent Ed (Ryan W. Garcia), who appears in the play as a voice on the phone, is behind this potentially lucrative meeting. He wants Peter to get the dirt, promising him big dollars if he can get enough of Sinatra’s prodigious sexual anatomy into the book. (There’s not a lot of “Downton Abbey” reserve in “Ava.”)

Aaron Costa Ganis and Elizabeth McGovern in “Ava: The Secret Conversations” at Geffen Playhouse.

(Jeff Lorch)

But Gardner doesn’t want to spill secrets about her famous husbands. She’d rather discuss her recent health struggles, a subject that Peter knows won’t sell many books. He lures her instead to tell the story of her life, from her North Carolina childhood to her entry into Hollywood as a teenager, to her tumultuous marriages and equally turbulent affairs.

Seductively kittenish, Gardner lives up to her profane reputation. She talks about sex with a foulmouthed innocence. Her remembrance of scenes of copulations past causes her no shame. She takes pride in her healthy libido. But Peter comes to discover that Gardner is as unpredictable a writing partner as she was as a wife and mistress. For all her naughty candor, she remains inscrutable, loyal only to her own capricious heart.

“Ava: The Secret Conversations” might sound like a disguised one-person show, but it’s really a two-performer play (with a third actor serving as a conduit for narrative odds and ends). In addition to playing the initially reluctant biographer, Ganis is asked to transform into Rooney, Shaw and Sinatra when the tales of these former husbands are told.

This is a tricky set of challenges, and Ganis comes through with flying colors. Some of the dialogue Peter has to speak is freighted with clunky exposition. But anyone who can play a convincing Rooney and Sinatra in the same show deserves a medal.

All eyes are naturally on McGovern’s Ava as she clutches her drink, lights another cigarette and moves a naked foot up her bug-eyed ghost writer’s leg. The performance makes a convincing case that vixenish wiles have no expiration date. (I’d like to take this moment to belatedly thank McGovern for the blissful memory of her Rosalind in the 1992 New York Shakespeare Festival production of Shakespeare’s “As You Like It” in Central Park.)

Not many contemporary actors could summon to the stage Gardner’s radiance and decrepitude simultaneously. The character’s flirtatious ploys have an air of desperation, but a spell is nonetheless cast so that the audience can’t help falling into a romantic trance along with Peter.

The play attempts to jazz up the star vehicle format with some hall of mirrors effects. These metatheatrical maneuvers at the beginning and end of “Ava” seem as if they were added last minute with thumbtacks.

The otherwise polished production unfolds handsomely on a London apartment set designed by David Meyer to give the impression of a luxury hotel suite. Von Stuelpnagel’s staging gives off a deluxe gleam. But it’s hard to imagine “Ava: The Secret Conversations” getting produced at the Geffen Playhouse without McGovern on the marquee as the show’s star.

Gardner, however, is a complex character — as elusive as she is forthcoming. Manufactured by Hollywood but owned by nobody, she reveals as much as she chooses and no more. As Peter discovers, her mystery may be the truest thing about her.